A post on
One Of Swords has a new episode of
One of Swords TV
where "Activision community management team of one" Dan Amrich attempts to sort
through the sticky issue of who owns the rights to No One Lives Forever,
Monolith's spy spoof series, last known to be the property of Vivendi Games
after they acquired with the Fox Interactive catalog. Since Vivendi eventually
merged with Activision, he seems like the one to ask, and Dan explains that some
of the IP they ended up with as a result of that merger has since been sold off,
using the example of Leisure Suit Larry, and that many of the games they
retained are now being sold on GOG.com, using the example of the King's Quest
series. As for NOLF, he says this is something he's asked about himself, going
on to explain:

The person that I normally talk to about this stuff does
not believe that we currently the rights. They've never seen it, they've never
been given the permission to put that stuff on Good Old Games. He said,
basically, 'If we had it, I would love to be able to reissue those old games.'
So, that leaves the question if Activision no longer has the rights to No One
Lives Forever, who does? Monolith was the developer that handled those games,
and they are now part of WB. So I thought, maybe at the time when Activision was
saying 'we'll keep these, we'll leave these, we'll sell these, whatever,' maybe
Monolith stepped up and took their IP back. So I contacted a friend at
Monolith... and he doesn't know. Uh, so, unfortunately, all I can definitively
say is that at this time I do not believe that Activision has the rights to No
One Lives Forever.

In other words, these are the games that are worried about because the others are already secure. They know who owns them, there are no questions about the rights. This isn't talk about a new game, this is about making the old ones available again for purchase.

Dev wrote on Apr 6, 2013, 12:09:One would think that whoever owns it would be willing to just sit back and cash the checks from GoG and steam by putting it up there. But for some reason, some companies don't seem to want to make money.

Legal gets scared about doing anything that would open them up to being sued, especially since putting a game up on GOG without authorization could amount to commercial piracy (and open them up to near-unlimited liability).

Then again, it was Legal that botched their sales contracts, which is the reason why nobody knows where the rights are...

One would think that whoever owns it would be willing to just sit back and cash the checks from GoG and steam by putting it up there. But for some reason, some companies don't seem to want to make money.

It's a good thing publishers have become such an integral part of gaming. Because as you can see, the minor stuff that they are supposed to do, such as keep track of who owns IP, they absolutely fucking suck at.

Yay publishers!

I still have both games, but they mess up on Win7. They install and play, but cutscenes get really weird. Characters are missing when they are supposed to speak, and then the cutscene won't progress, and you can't skip them. Weirdest bugs I'd ever seen.